Thursday, August 20, 2009

Of the Baltica Festival

It has been some time since we attended the Baltica 2009 International Folklore Festival. Well, we sort of stopped by for some of the festival on our way elsewhere. Like many festivals celebrating folklife in the Baltic, it featured a lot of floral wreaths and colorful woven skirts and singing and dancing. But this one featured some more musical insight: One can only surmise from this scene that in the ancient pagan rituals along the banks of the Lielupe, Lettish tribesmen and women gathered in a great circle to worship the mighty oak tree with music from that most sacred and righteous of instruments - the kazoo.

Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.